Benjamin Nowack wrote:
>Hi Michael,
>
>(sorry for the short answer, gotta leave in a sec.)
>We (SWEO and the Comm team) had looong discussions around the
>SemWeb logo and whether we can use the RDF icon and re-brand
>it. *If* we had taken the RDF technology icon, we would
>have triggered a number practical issues, esp. for site that
>use the RDF icon as a pointer to RDF data. The SemWeb logo
>represents the whole initiative, not just a selected
>technology.
This was a presumption which I had: That the triangle really was the RDF
icon, and so a "Semantic Web" icon was still missing (in theory).
The problem I believe to see is that in the meanwhile many people (like
myself) seem to associate the RDF logo with the whole Semantic Web movement.
For instance, the "Semantic Web" Google group
http://groups.google.com/group/semantic_web
uses it as its logo, and this group, like the SWIG list, has been created to
cover all SemWeb topics, not only RDF. Here's its description:
"XML, RDF, OWL, Knowledge Representation, Ontology, Reasoning, Agent,
Semantic Web, Knowledge Management."
planetrdf.com, which is in fact also by far not only about RDF, uses the
triangle as its favicon. (Btw: I actually found out about the new
SemanticWeb logo by reading PlanetRDF. :-)) And I have seen several Semantic
Web projects, which use icons that obviously resemble the RDF logo, even if
they are not triangles, but at least connected nodes, like in the NEPOMUK
semantic desktop project:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070621110530/nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/
(Note: This is a WaybackMachine entry, the semanticdesktop.org server
currently seems to be down.)
Just recently, there has been a thread in this list, where the idea of
"Linked Data" was discussed as a distinguishing feature of the Semantic Web:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2007Oct/0051.html
And I have the feeling that this is an idea which many community members can
settle on. And the old triangle icon pretty well matched this idea IMHO. Now
I see this box. Hm, doesn't look to me neither like data nor like linking of
somewhat... (Perhaps, this would have been a better icon for a future
3D-Internet: A 3D box with three sides, pretty coloured, and open to all,
instead of "owned by Linden Lab". SCNR :-))
>There *may* come dedicated logos for the
>various sub-groups (GRDDL, OWL, RDFa, etc), but the
>communications team really wanted an umbrella branding, too.
Maybe we already had this before, at least if we hadn't looked that
precisely on formal/technical aspects like that the triangle icon was
intended to point to RDF data in the first place. Well then, let's see how
fast this new icon gets adopted by the Semantic Web community.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Dipl.-Inform. Michael Schneider
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe
Abtl. Information Process Engineering (IPE)
Tel : +49-721-9654-726
Fax : +49-721-9654-727
Email: Michael.Schneider@fzi.de
Web : http://www.fzi.de/ipe/eng/mitarbeiter.php?id=555
FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik an der UniversitÃ¤t Karlsruhe
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